Mexico Map 1757 Regional Print - Acapulco, Tamaulipas, Mexico City

Antoine Francois Prevost's fifteen-volume Histoire Generale des Voyages, the era's most ambitious compilation of global exploration accounts, called on Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, France's chief naval hydrographer, to supply this map of the Mexican empire in 1757, one of dozens of regional sheets he contributed to the project over its long publication run. Bellin dressed the map with a decorative title cartouche, a lighter touch than his purely functional naval charts, reflecting the fact that Prevost's volumes were aimed at an educated general readership rather than working navigators. The map's coverage was drawn to match Prevost's text closely, and surviving copies still carry the printer's binding instructions distinguishing the quarto and octavo editions of the volume it illustrated, a reminder that this sheet was produced as an integrated part of a bound reference work rather than a freestanding wall map.

The map's northern edge reaches San Miguel, Ixtapa and Tamaulipas, tracing the outer frontier of Spanish settlement along Mexico's Gulf coast. Acapulco anchors the Pacific side of the map, already established as New Spain's principal port for the Manila galleon trade linking Mexico to the Philippines. Mexcaltepec and Pointe d'Antonio Sardo mark further points along the Gulf coastline to the south, rounding out Bellin's survey of the viceroyalty's maritime boundary. Mexico City itself, though not singled out with special emphasis on the sheet, sits at the geographic and administrative center of the territory the map frames, the seat from which Spanish colonial authority radiated out toward each of these more distant coastal points.

A thoughtful gift for a collector of French Enlightenment-era travel literature or anyone assembling a set of maps from the Prevost voyages project. TheMapVault also carries Albrizzi's 1740 Venetian map of the same region and Kitchin's 1795 sheet; this 1757 Bellin sheet sits chronologically between them and is the only one of the three drawn specifically to accompany a travel-narrative compendium rather than a standalone atlas, giving its coastal detail, from Tamaulipas down to Acapulco, a noticeably more travel-oriented emphasis. It ships unframed, in the full range of nine sizes.